The budget reform literature assumes that those who can change the nature of budget deliberations can influence budget outcomes. Learning what factors influence the nature of budget deliberations is therefore important both to those who want to design more effective, responsive and efficient deliberation processes and to those who want to affect specific budget outcomes. / This study examines four years of appropriations subcommittee hearings in Florida, drawing its conceptual framework from Schick's and Grizzle's budget deliberation orientations: control, management, planning and funding. Content analysis was used to generate the dependent variables. Ten independent variables, considered influential by budget researchers, were tested for their strength of association in three separate levels of analysis: bivariate associations, multivariate associations and a full model. Exponential Poisson regression was used to model the relationships between the variables. Four factors, strongly supported by the budget literature and the contextual data from the legislative setting, were found to have statistically significant associations with legislative deliberation orientation: executive authority, program type, earmarked revenues and formula funding. Other variables in the quantitative approach found promising but in need of further research were the state of the economy and changes in budget information. / Additional research on the effect of subcommittee chairperson style and political alliances on subcommittee norms and behavior is also suggested based upon information drawn from the content analysis. / This research suggests that executive power to "steer" legislative deliberations is limited and that, in states where a strong legislature controls the formulation of the executive budget, budget reform process might be more successful if directed toward legislative rather than executive budget reform. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 50-11, Section: A, page: 3734. / Major Professor: Gloria A. Grizzle. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1989.

The study tested three types of models, i.e. financial, macroeconomic, and the combined financial-macroeconomic model (FINMAC), an aggregation of the expanded Gordon model and the IS-LM model. This was done to determine the impact of certain financial and macroeconomic variables on stock prices using the S & P composite, industrial, utility, financial, and transportation stock price indices. The models were tested in two ways: first, in five sub-periods and second for the entire 1968-1988 period. / The results of the tests varied considerably in different sub-periods and in various stock price indices. Some of the independent variables were consistent with the theoretical expectations in certain sub-periods and inconsistent in others. These inconsistencies could be due to the volatility of stock prices and other economic shocks that occurred within specific sub-periods. It could also be that the participants' perception of the impact of these variables is different from the theoretical expectations. / But over the span of the five sub-periods, some of the financial and macroeconomic variables proved to be good determinants of stock price behavior i.e., the real interest rate, the price-earnings ratio, the speculation index, the volume traded, change in the real money supply, and the real growth rate in earnings per share. Although there were instances where they deviated from the theoretical expectations, most times they were significant and consistent. / Generally, the models seemed to be able to track aggregate stock price behavior well within sub-periods characterized by economic stability, but most did not perform well during periods of high inflation, high uncertainties, and the 1987 stock market crash. Results of the models seem to show some promise when tested for the entire 1968-1988 period. This could be attributed to the length of the test period which allows the stock price indices to adjust to changes in both the financial and macroeconomic variables. / Of the three models tested, the FINMAC Model showed the most promising results. With the exception of 1978-1982 and 1987-1988, most of the coefficients in this model were significant and consistent with theoretical expectations. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-12, Section: A, page: 4225. / Major Professor: Frederick Bell. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1990.

A laboratory study which examines the usefulness of different information presentation formats in predicting bond rating changes was conducted. The study utilizes tabular displays, bar-graphs, and Chernoff faces. A well-known psychological test of field dependence, the Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT), is incorporated in the experiment to control for this possible confounding influence on subjects' performance. An analysis of subjects' data utilization and decision strategies is also presented. / Subjects received financial information for twenty-one companies and were asked to predict whether these companies had their bond ratings upgraded, downgraded, or unchanged. Each subject received either tabular displays, tabular displays with accompanying bar-graphs, or tabular displays supplemented with Chernoff faces. Dependent variables were the percentage of correct predictions and the time spent making decisions. / Results indicate that none of the three modes of presentation was clearly superior in assisting the subjects correctly predict rating changes. However, field-independent subjects receiving tabular displays alone were significantly better predictors than field-dependent subjects receiving this mode. Subjects receiving the tabular displays augmented by either the bar-graphs or Chernoff faces took significantly less time, with those receiving faces taking the least average time. Field dependence was insignificant in explaining the percentage of correct predictions for subjects receiving the combined formats and in explaining the time taken by subjects for all modes. / Subjects making the most correct predictions reported utilizing industry data to a greater extent than the worst predictors. Both the best and worst predictors receiving augmented formats reported more reliance on the tabular displays than either the graphs or faces. / Lastly, fastest decision makers reported less use of industry data with the tabular display only, and less use of the tabular displays when receiving combined formats. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 49-12, Section: A, page: 3781. / Major Professor: William A. Hillison. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1988.

This paper reexamines data on major industrial countries to investigate the dynamic interaction between money supply shocks and the real exchange rate. Specifically, this paper shows the relationship of observed comovements between money supply, industrial production index, interest rates, prices and real exchange rates to existing theories of real exchange rate determination. Using Vector Autoregression modeling technique alternative Granger causal orderings are fitted to the data in order to test validity of the different exchange rate models. The results of this study support the theory that the effect of money supply shocks is transitory and not permanent so there is no gain or loss in a country's competitiveness. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-04, Section: A, page: 1458. / Major Professor: Joan G. Haworth. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.

Financial asset prices reflect investor's perspectives over the current and future situation of a firm, an industry, a country and ultimately, the entire economy. For this reason, how financial asset prices are driven has been a fundamental economic question. Specific market characteristics such as the number of sellers and buyers, investors valuation perceptions, market availability of other assets and legal and technical properties are some of the features that affect asset prices. When the same asset is traded at different venues, these specific characteristics may vary, following a certain degree of heterogeneity across buyers and sellers. The direct consequence is that transaction prices of the same asset differ across markets. However, prices will also not drift apart, since arbitrage opportunities would arise, reducing or even eliminating the differences. Prices of similar securities linked to a single latent price, as derivative markets, for instance, present the same behaviour. Price differences among markets observed at high frequencies are an indication that venues incorporate new information in an unlike way. The structure and design of a market impacts its behaviour, liquidity, effciency, and hence how prices are discovered. The task of identifying the leading markets and understanding how the price dynamics occurs are the main objectives of the price discovery analysis. Chapter 1 introduces the research subject of price discovery, motivating the importance of what this thesis proposes and the results and conclusions obtained. Chapter 2 explains in details the main methodologies used to measure price discovery and the important results in the empirical literature. Chapter 3 motivates the data set this thesis uses, with institutional background details and specific market and firm characteristics. We also present in details the steps we follow to deal with standard issues of high frequency data, such as outliers and errors on a tick-by-tick database and non synchronicity of prices at different markets. Chapter 4 extends the standard price discovery model to estimate the information share (IS) accounting for the information content of both common and preferred non US stocks, their American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) counterparts traded on the New York Stock Exchange and ARCA, and the exchange rate. We gauge the significance of price discovery in the home and foreign markets, through common or preferred stocks. One of the main critiques on the IS methodology is that it does not deliver a single measure when there is contemporaneous correlation among markets. We propose an ordering invariant methodology that delivers a single measure of IS.We find that the foreign market is more important than the home market for the price discovery of Petrobras, the Brazilian stated-owned oil giant, and Vale, one of the largest mining companies in the world. Additionally, the Brazilian market has lost significant importance after the 2008/2009 financial crisis. During this period, common and preferred stocks shared a single common factor, with voting premium being a stationary process. Chapter 5 investigates instantaneous and long-run linkages between common and preferred shares traded at both domestic and foreign markets. We develop a market microstructure model in which the dynamics of the different share prices react to three common factors, namely, the efficient price, the efficient exchange rate, and the efficient voting premium. We show how to identify the structural innovations so as to differentiate instantaneous and long-run effects. First, we obtain dynamic measures of price discovery that quantify how prices traded at different venues respond to shocks on the common factors. Second, we are able to test whether shocks in the efficient exchange rate change the value of the firm. Third, we test whether shocks on the efficient voting premium have a permanent effect on preferred shares. We implement an empirical application using high-frequency data on six Brazilian large companies. We find that, in the long-run, a depreciation of the Brazilian currency leads to a depreciation of the value of the firm that exceeds the expected arbitrage adjustment. In addition, a positive shock on the voting premium yields a positive impact on the value of the firm. Our price discovery analysis also reveals that one trading day suffices to impound new information on all share prices, regardless of the venue they trade at. Finally, Chapter 6 concludes.

This thesis comprises three main chapters focusing on a number of issues related to forecasting economic and nancial time series. Chapter 2 contains a detailed empirical study comparing forecast perfor- mance of a number of popular term structure models in predicting the UK yield curve. Several questions are addressed and investigated, such as whether macroeconomic information helps in forecasting yields and whether predict- ing performance of models change over time. We nd evidence of signi cant time-variation in forecast accuracy of competing models, particularly during the recent nancial crisis period. Chapter 3 explores density forecasts of the yield curve which, unlike the point forecasts, provide a full account of possible uncertainties surrounding the forecasts. We contribute by evaluating predictive performance of the recently developed stochastic-volatility arbitrage-free Nelson-Siegel models of Chris- tensen et al. (2010). The one-month-ahead predictive densities of the models appear to be inferior compared to those of their constant-volatility counter- parts. The advantage of modelling time-varying volatilities becomes evident only when forecasting interest rates at longer horizons. Chapter 3 deals with a more general problem of forecasting time series under structural change and long memory noise. Presence of long memory in the data is often easily confused with structural change. Wrongly account- ing for one when the other is present may lead to serious forecast failure. In our search for a forecast method that can perform reliably in presence of both features we extend the recent work of Giraitis et al. (2013). A forecast strategy with data-dependent discounting is adopted and typical robust-to- structural-change methods such as rolling window regression, forecast averag- ing and exponentially weighted moving average methods are exploited. We provide detailed theoretical analyses of forecast optimality by considering cer- tain types of structural changes and various degrees of long range dependence in noise. An extensive Monte Carlo study and empirical application to many UK time series ensure usefulness of adaptive forecast methods.

This dissertation examines the effects of external economic conditions, particularly inflation, on state and local government taxing and expenditures decisions. Existing literature on state and local fiscal decisions focuses on the demographic and institutional characteristics of each governing jurisdiction as the primary determinants of tax structures and expenditure levels. There has also been some study of the effects of fluctuations in federal spending and the business cycle. Inflation is not incorporated explicitly in these studies I develop a model in which tax and expenditure decisions are based on a political objective function that minimizes costs of tax rate charges and costs of expenditure levels deviating from a hypothetical level determined without regard to tax change costs, subject to a budget constraint. Two types of taxes are modeled: those levied on an ad valorem basis, and those levied on a per unit basis. In the absence of tax rate changes, revenues from the ad valorem taxes keep up with inflation, while the purchasing power of per unit tax revenues dwindles due to inflation. Because decision-makers seek to limit costs from tax rate changes, they do not adjust per unit tax rates enough to prevent erosion of real per unit revenues. Consequently, real government expenditure levels are lowered by inflation and the revenue structure is altered toward heavier reliance on ad valorem revenue sources The theoretical implications of this model are expanded by simulations showing the extent of these effects under different hypothetical rates of inflation and federal aid growth, and under varying assumptions about the relative weights of these political costs The model is tested with econometric analysis of data aggregated by states for U.S. state and local governments from 1962 to 1982. The data are found to be consistent with the empirical implications of the model. Finally, local fiscal decision-making is analyzed in more detail through a case study of New Orleans' fiscal history during the period 1978-1988 / acase@tulane.edu

Chapter one studies the effects of nominal and real uncertainty on output growth. Uncertainty is modeled as the conditional variance of the GARCH model, and the effects of uncertainty are captured by the GARCH-M model. There are strong empirical evidences indicating that inflation uncertainty lowers output growth. There are weak evidence supporting the argument that higher output growth is associated with more risk. The empirical evidences presented indicate that the cost of inflation arises mainly from its uncertainty rather than from its level Chapters two and three study the asymmetric effect and the size effects of monetary shocks, respectively. It is shown in chapter 2 that negative shocks tend to significantly decrease output growth while positive shocks do not. However, this asymmetric effects are less robust when GARCH effects are modeled. The main arguments for asymmetric effects could be found in the goods market and the credit market. The goods market argument says that price is downward rigid but upward flexible, which causes supply curve to be convex and effects of shocks to be asymmetric. Credit constraints theory argues that positive shocks are similar to pushing a string and have no effect, while negative shocks decrease output growth like pulling a string Output is modeled as a quadratic function of monetary shocks in chapter three. The empirical results support this function form and indicate that small positive shocks have larger effects than big positive shocks and big negative shocks have larger effects than small negative shocks. In other words, the effects of monetary shocks are related to their size, and the size effects of positive shocks and the size effects of negative shocks are in the opposite direction. Two transmission mechanisms of monetary shocks are proposed to explain the size effects of shocks. The sticky price and sticky wage theory is able to explain the size effects of positive shocks. The liquidity constraint theory is able to explain the size effects of both positive and negative shocks. Both explanations show that imperfections and frictions in the market are important to transmit monetary shocks to the real economy / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation consists of three essays that analyze different aspects of the contemporary Mexican economy, contributing to our understanding of the Mexican financial market and of the economic behavior of emerging countries. First, taking market prices of two financial instruments in the Mexican market (The Cete and the ajustabono) that directly depend on either the real interest rate or inflation expectations, I was able to measure the inflation risk premium. I find a significant inflation risk premium of 486 basis points on an annualized basis during July 1992 to March 1999. In addition, I analyze the time variation in inflation risk premium across the entire sample, finding that, in general the size of the inflation risk premium for each year confirms the existence of a positive inflation risk premium because of the inflation uncertainty prevalent in Mexico Second, this dissertation analyzes the inflation process in Mexico, recognizing that the variance of Mexico's inflation changes over time (specifically in 1982, 1988 and 1994) and can be modeled following the ARCH (Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedastic) model. I find that the inflation in Mexico follows an ARCH process from 1978 to 1999 and an ARCH(M) process from 1989 to 1999. I find that the process that better models the conditional variance from 1978 to 1988 is an ARCH (2), and from 1989 to 1999 an ARCH (1). In both periods, the exchange rate parity is significant in the conditional variance and in the mean of the inflation. The significant variables to explain the inflation during 1978 to 1988 are two inflation lags, the exchange rate parity and the money supply (M1). These same variables, along with wages, are significant in explaining the inflation during 1989 to 1999 Finally, this dissertation studies the relationships among financial activity, real economic activity and monetary factors. Using Granger type causality, I investigate lead lag relationships among the IPC (Indice de Precios y Cotizaciones) returns of the Bolsa Mexicana de Valores (BMV), Industrial Production and the money supply (M1). I find 2 evidence indicating that the stock returns of the BMV are a leading indicator of future Mexican real economic activity measured by the Industrial Production; and money supply (M1) plays a significant role in leading the stock returns of the BMV and the real variables measured by Industrial Production. I find an asymmetric response in the Industrial Production when there was a negative percent change in the BMV returns, and significant asymmetric responses in the Industrial Production and Cete interest rate when a negative percent change in money supply occurs / acase@tulane.edu

The local sales tax is a widely utilized measure by which sub-state level governmental jurisdictions in the United States raise revenues. Despite the wide usage of this tax, its importance as a revenue source, and the long period of time for which it has been utilized, there has not been a great deal of attention paid to it. Our goal in this analysis is to add to this body of analysis in several specific ways This first of these is to bring empirical methodologies to bear on the problem which have been developed in the period since many of the issues specific to local sales taxation were first addressed. These more advanced techniques may call into question results which have been accepted in the literature for many years. The second advance of this work is also empirical in nature. Our data set is larger and more complete than many used in the past. Again, we are curious to see if previous results are robust to improved data The third major addition to the local public finance literature brought about by this work is theoretical in nature. We introduce a theoretical model of intra-regional competition. That is, we look at the inter-actions between political jurisdictions which share common physical boundaries. This approach is unique in the literature, and we develop results which may alter some commonly held suppositions about public goods provision at the local level / acase@tulane.edu